


down, down, down

by queenkatharine



Category: Three Dark Crowns Series - Kendare Blake
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Breccia Domain, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:01:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25704028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenkatharine/pseuds/queenkatharine
Summary: The boy is guiding Katharine towards the Breccia Domain. His hands are placed on her body in a way that he could easily pick her up and set her back down again.Mirabella watches, and realizes.He’s going to throw her in.(AU where Mirabella stumbles upon Pietyr and Katharine just as he's about to throw her into the Breccia Domain.)
Kudos: 28





	down, down, down

**Author's Note:**

> I re-read the scene where Pietyr throws Katharine into the Breccia Domain and I thought "Hmmm, I wonder what this would look like to an outsider that just happened upon the scene." And then I thought "Hmmm, imagine if that someone was Mirabella."
> 
> (Also, note that this is right after the Quickening ceremony where Arsinoe loses control of her bear. Mirabella thinks Arsinoe purposefully attacked her at this point.)
> 
> (Also, I haven't reread Three Dark Crowns in a while so Mirabella might be out of character a bit for the first book.)
> 
> Some lines and parts of the dialogue are taken directly from Three Dark Crowns.

Mirabella doesn’t know where she is going.

A moment ago she was being corralled back into her tent in the Westwood encampment after the disastrous Quickening ceremony, her mind racing as she tried to reconcile her memories of Arsinoe back at the Black Cottage with the Arsinoe who had just tried to kill her with her bear. The idea of attacking one of her sisters was unthinkable to Mirabella, yet Arsinoe showed no hesitation as the bear charged Mirabella’s stage. When had everything changed so much for them? It felt like yesterday that all three of them – Mirabella, Katharine, Arsinoe – were taken their separate ways.

Bree and Elizabeth had listened to her as she explained why Joseph had saved her, but as she was doing so, she felt a strange sense of unease. Something had happened, or something was happening (or something was going to happen), and it set Mirabella on edge. Standing in that tent, she could feel her blood flowing through her veins, could feel chills running down her spine as goosebumps raised the hair on her arms. Something pulled at her chest, like there was a string tied around her heart and someone was tugging at it from the other end.

On Luca’s orders, armed priestesses guarded her tent from all sides, alert from the close call at the Quickening. If she wanted to follow that string, that pull that Mirabella realized was calling from the southern woods that bordered Innisfuil Valley, she needed to lose them and head south on her own.

“Bree,” Mirabella whispered. “Do you think you could get the priestesses to leave their posts around the tent for a minute?”

Bree shook her head. “They won’t listen to me. Only Luca can order them around.”

“Okay,” she nodded, as if this had been the answer she expected. “Then I’ll have to settle for Plan B.” And then she fainted, hitting the ground with a soft _thud._

“Mirabella!” Elizabeth yelled in horror. Before she could even reach the unconscious form of the queen, several priestesses flooded the tent and ushered Elizabeth and Bree away from Mirabella.

“What happened? _What did you do?_ ” One of the priestesses hissed. She eyed both of them with suspicion, and Bree inhaled a sharp breath in realization.

“We don’t know! One moment she was talking about how hot it was in here and needing some air, and the next she was on the ground. It was all so sudden!” Bree cried. In fact, Bree played the part so well she’d shed an actual tear that left a glistening trail down her cheek, Mirabella had noted through a slightly opened eye.

Elizabeth had been slower in catching on to Mirabella’s plan, but when she did, she gave the priestess her best innocent expression. “Please, let us take her for a walk around the encampment. You won’t even need to guard her, there are priestesses posted everywhere.”

After more arguing and negotiating, as Bree and Elizabeth were drawing closer to an agreement with the priestesses, Mirabella had slowly started to “wake up” and gather her wits.

“Bree? Elizabeth?”

They cried out and the priestesses sighed in relief. Not for her well-being, of course, but for the fact that they wouldn’t be punished by High Priestess Luca for her precious Queen Mirabella falling ill on their watch.

As they made their way through the encampment, Mirabella had squeezed Bree’s hand in thanks for quickly following her lead. Elizabeth was disgruntled that she had to lie to the priestesses, especially considering the tense situation after the Quickening, but what was one more lie on top of everything else she kept secret for her friends?

“Something is wrong,” Mirabella had muttered under her breath so that only her companions could hear her as they walked around a tent. “I think I’m being warned by someone.”

“Warned by who? Is Arsinoe going to attack you again?” Bree questioned. Her brow furrowed, and she quickly scanned the area for anything out of place.

“No,” Mirabella hesitated, maneuvering between two tents and out of sight of the rest of the encampment, “not Arsinoe. Something else. I think there is something guiding me south. To the woods.”

She turned towards Bree and Elizabeth, who had halted in their tracks a step behind Mirabella.

Elizabeth had looked contemplative, scouring her mind for an explanation. “The woods? There’s nothing there, except …”

“Except?”

“The Breccia Domain. It’s where the vanquished queens’ bodies are disposed of.” She focused her gaze on Mirabella. “If that’s where you’re being led, then you must go there.”

They were nearly at the edge of the encampment. A lone priestess kept watch over the forest on this side of the camp, but that was no matter. Elizabeth motioned for Mirabella and Bree to stay hidden as she made her way to the priestess, exclaiming that she’d lost them both and that she needed help searching the surrounding tents.

“I’ll cover for you,” Bree had said. “Be careful. Don’t do anything stupid.”

Now, Mirabella hurries through the forest with an urgency she’s never felt before. She’s sure that by now the whole Westwood encampment has raised an alarm and all the priestesses are combing through the surrounding forest for her. Mirabella would be touched if she didn’t know that as soon as they found her, they would not let her out of anyone’s sight until she could be put under lock and key in the Westwood mansion. Perhaps they’ll even throw her into the basement just to really get their point across.

She tries not to think about how cold and lonely and dark the Westwood basement is. Instead, she picks up her pace, her lungs labouring to take in as much oxygen as she can. A stitch forms in her side and it takes everything in her power not to keel over and wait until it fades, but the feeling in her chest grows hotter the closer she gets to her destination. Not to mention that she refuses to be captured by the priestesses like a wild animal again.

Up ahead, the trees thin out and eventually she can make out where the tree line ends. But before she can make her way past it, Mirabella abruptly comes to a halt and latches onto a tree, stopped by some sort of invisible force. She closes her eyes, staving off the dizziness that comes from sprinting to suddenly standing still. The muscles in her legs want to give out, but Mirabella clings to the rough bark of the tree and grits her teeth.

When the feeling passes, she opens her eyes and draws her eyes up from the grey rock of the ground to the Breccia Domain. Her heart stops dead in her chest at the sight ahead of her.

Although she’d only seen her once at the Quickening ceremony, Mirabella knows the short stature of the figure with long black hair and an equally dark dress like the back of her hand. Katharine.

With her is a boy with icy blond hair who could only be an Arron. She’s not too familiar with the Arrons, but Luca had once described the distinct traits of the family should Mirabella ever have to encounter one.

Her sister and the Arron boy aren’t enough to startle her. What sets her on edge is how Katharine rests her head on his shoulder as the boy sways with her. For a split-second Mirabella thinks they are dancing, but her heartbeat picks up when she realizes that no, they aren’t dancing. Katharine’s eyes are closed and the boy isn’t looking in Mirabella’s direction at all.

His gaze is focused on the wide, dark fissure in the earth, so black and ominous and full of a presence that does the opposite of calming her.

The boy is guiding Katharine towards the Breccia Domain. His hands are placed on her body in a way that he could easily pick her up and set her back down again.

Mirabella watches, and realizes.

He’s going to throw her in.

 _Surely not_ , a small part of her tries to rationalize, to bargain, to plead. For who would want to throw sweet Katharine into a pit where only the decayed bodies of the vanquished queens could keep her company?

A decision is made in less than a second. Arsinoe may have attacked Mirabella, but Katharine is still innocent. She can still save one sister where she couldn’t save the other.

Mirabella slips away from the safety of the forest and edges closer towards the pair. Neither of them notices her approaching, caught up as they are in their own individual thoughts. She can hear them talking now, but nothing too distinct that her brain can latch onto.

But as she slides closer to them, she swears that Katharine says, “I love you, too, Pietyr.”

If not for the time she spent in the Westwood mansion being made to keep her temper and emotions at bay, Mirabella would zero in on and strike this Pietyr boy with lightning without any regard for her surroundings. But she has years of experience with keeping calm and not lashing out without strategy.

That is why, when Pietyr takes Katharine by the shoulders – both of them still unaware of Mirabella’s presence despite her being in their peripheral visions – and steps back from her, Mirabella doesn’t move. She stays still as a statue, reaching out with her elemental gift for the rock beneath her feet, rooting herself to the ground and familiarizing herself with every molecule in the grey rock of the Breccia Domain.

“Pietyr?” Katharine asks.

“I am sorry,” Pietyr says, and then he throws her.

And she would have gone down had Mirabella not shifted the rock of the fissure’s ledge and extended it so that Katharine hits it with a loud _thud_.

Mirabella winces, imagining the pain of hitting rock unexpectedly and the purple bruises that would emerge later. At least Mirabella’s own fall had been onto the soft carpeted floor of her tent where she had braced herself as she pretended to faint.

Katharine can count herself lucky, though. It was either this or falling for who-knows-how-long in a panicked state before finally hitting the bottom of the boned-filled Breccia Domain.

Pietyr turns toward Mirabella, at first confused, then shocked, then outraged. “What are you doing!”

“What am I doing?” Mirabella parrots indignantly. “What are _you_ doing?”

“I’m keeping her safe from you!”

That’s what does it. The very notion that she would do anything to Katharine as horrific as what this boy almost did to her sister – it makes Mirabella see red. Deep within her, that string finally snaps along with her restraint.

“ _Safe?!_ ” Mirabella screams. “You call murdering my sister keeping her safe?”

“That’s not what –”

“I don’t know who you are to my sister. I don’t care that you’re an Arron.” Tendrils of her hair blocks part of her sight as a wind whips at it, roaring in her ears and freezing her skin. It’s Beltane, nearly summer, yet there is a chill in the air that is undoubtedly a feature of the Breccia Domain. Distantly, she registers that the treetops are violently swaying, and several small pebbles and leaves are swept away from the ground as if guided by a broom, skittering into the Breccia Domain. “You have no right to harm my sister.”

His blood drains from his face and he becomes, somehow, even paler. “No, wait, I –”

“You’ll regret ever laying a finger on my sister!”

She doesn’t have a moment to think it through. All she can feel is anger and every heartbeat calls out for _Katharine, Katharine, Katharine, Katharine_.

“I didn’t think –”

“Yes, you _didn’t_ think.”

“I’m sorry!” he begs for forgiveness, echoing the last words he would’ve ever spoken to Katharine.

With that, Mirabella extends her arms, pushing with her abilities at the wind that’s left her half-frozen by now, concentrating the power into a funnel that pushes Pietyr over the edge. She glares as she makes eye contact with him until the very last second, when his eyes widen with the realization that _this is it, it’s over_ and his arms windmill as if to regain his balance. He doesn’t stand a chance. It’s inevitable.

And so, as Katharine stirs on her makeshift ledge, Pietyr tips over the edge and goes down, down, down into the bottomless pit of the Breccia Domain.

**Author's Note:**

> So, uh, I might make this longer than one chapter? No promises, though. I was just struck by inspiration for this piece.


End file.
